Many different types of services use fleet tracking systems, including vehicle for hire services that transport persons, e.g., taxi, limousine, bus, and shuttle companies, delivery companies that transport goods, e.g., local and long haul trucking companies, and business service companies, e.g., plumbers, utilities, and exterminators. There may be many operational constraints and complexities in an asset fleet operation, such as route optimization, route management, user and asset management, schedule management, warehouse and inventory management, and communication management between administrators and in-field assets. Fleet administrators need to know where each asset in the fleet is located and what it is doing in order to make well-informed decisions, such as, on how to use the assets most efficiently, reduce fraud, increase safety, and etc.
Fleet tracking serves a variety of functions, including asset tracking, destination tracking, geo-fence detection, time card tracking, fuel card usage, fuel card tracking, and speed limit compliance. To accomplish this, the fleet tracking service must perform the basic function of locating the positions of assets in the fleet. This may be done through a variety of technologies, but is often achieved through the use of global positioning system (GPS) tracking devices installed in the assets or GPS enabled smartphones carried by an operator. The geographic position and sometimes additional information, e.g., speed, heading, and oil levels, are relayed from the assets to a central processing system using some form of wireless communication channel, e.g., cellular tower, Wi-Fi, or the Internet.
Currently, wireless voice communication between administrators and operators is the primary means of updating the administrator of the status of each asset of a route. As a secondary means of communication, administrators and operators may use bi-directional or two-way messaging by e-mail, a mobile application, a chat service, or any other means of electronic communication. A limitation of current systems is that large amounts of data cannot be displayed on a single screen and can require many screens in a logistics or operational command center. Even with multiple large high-resolution screens or multiple high-resolution projectors, there are limits on how many routes can be viewed concurrently. The systems may be unable to accommodate the needs of large asset fleets, such as fleets comprising hundreds, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of assets operating in a plurality of geographic regions. The large number of screens also consumes a considerable amount of energy and space.
Another limitation of current systems is that they mostly analyze route deviations in a textual and/or numeric format. For example, an automated monitoring system may notify an administrator about a route stop lateness, route deviation, route violation and etc., but the notification occurs immediately before or at the time of the action. With current systems, administrators cannot see a visual representation of any of the violations or progress indicators in an interface designed to concurrently view many routes.
Thus, there is a need for a tracking system to collect information from a high number of assets and to aggregate this information into a centralized data pool, and to present it to a system administrator in a format that is intuitive and allows for effective decision-making.